Kindergarten

The Montessori school I went to for kindergarten used composition books for children to keep track of their assignments.  Young Jenny Davidson's handwriting improved a good deal over the course of that year...

(This book lets me say with certainty that I first read Charlotte's Web in April 1977 - I remember being very struck by the revelation that county was a different word from country!)

Delay, deferral

From Johnson's "Life of Pope," on Pope's Iliad translation:

When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural to suppose that he would have brought his work to a more speedy conclusion. The Iliad, containing less than sixteen thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

The school year

This is perhaps the moment at which I declare that the semester is officially getting the better of me! I have temporarily wrangled it back into submission - I've done all the reading for tomorrow's classes (Plato's "Phaedrus," Derrida's long essay "Plato's pharmacy," poems about women by Pope and Swift, Johnson's life of Pope), I've done the subsequent week's reading for the MA seminar so that I could write the assignment that's due in class next week and hand it out tomorrow, I've answered three of the five copy-editor's queries on my Shakespeare adaptation piece and am about to head out to the library to get the books I need to answer the other two. I've written comments on eight of the sixteen undergrad assignments I intend to give back in class tomorrow, and will perhaps find a quiet table in a cafe post-library visit where I can finish the other eight: if I do that, then I can stop for the evening and figure there's enough time in and around the cracks tomorrow to do the actual class prep....

(I was out too many evenings this week, especially given the fact that I didn't really have a weekend last week due to travels; I am already thumped by fatigue and it's not even Monday! I didn't make it out for a run this afternoon, either - too much work - which was a pity as it was the most perfect weather and I'm not very happy about how little I've been running this fall.)

The table in my living room has a huge and ominous pile of materials that I need to read and write important letters about (important to people other than myself, I mean!): I think I won't be able to tackle that until Wednesday. Ugh, ugh, ugh...

The beast

Record-breaking chocolate bar! (Via I.H.D.)

"If I'm taking a walk and I see a cat, I'm happy"

Emma Brockes profiles Haruki Murakami for the Guardian:

How, then, did he find the confidence to do what he wanted?

"Confidence; as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved. Those three things haven't changed from my childhood. I know what I love, still, now. That's a confidence. If you don't know what you love, you are lost."

Clouds, water, paper

"Water Stains on the Wall" was not quite what I expected: I had somehow (unrealistically!) imagined this Taiwanese dance piece that promised to mix up calligraphy and tai chi and ballet and all sorts of other things would capture exactly the magic of something else I saw at BAM in the spring, the ombromanie of Philippe Beau. At any rate, it was nothing like that: it was worthwhile, but I found it frustrating to have so little sense of the separate idioms that are being combined. I am really too much an academic, but I found myself with all sorts of questions I could not at all answer: most pressingly, were there specific postures or movements that would be known to the well-informed viewer as allusions to individual calligraphic characters or sequences? The dancers are interesting to watch (they are extraordinarily athletic), but no cumulative meanings emerge from the patterns on the stage; I think my favorite short sequence was one where the music went silent and the projections across the white sheet-of-paper stage suddenly went much more quickly and more really and truly like clouds across the sky - there were a few other moments that really captured my attention, and it was enjoyable to gaze upon throughout, but it withheld significance from the outside viewer. Also: why, oh why do these top-quality companies think it is OK to perform to recorded music? Really all you need is a couple of excellent people and some good equipment and a sense of what to do: Nico has of course spoiled me for this sort of thing, but the canned music is not convincing to me (it is mostly by this guy, it is not an idiom I know well either but it's the lack of a responsive live sound rather than the actual music as such that strikes me as irksome).

The ABCs of the novel

I'm not sure whether this link will work for non-Columbia affiliates (it's an alumni event, but really it's open to the public), so I'll paste in the information just in case. They have a funny constraint: you are allowed to use a sheet of notes or an aide-memoire of some sort, but you're not supposed to lecture, they will prefer speakers to carry on off the tops of their heads! This is good, under the circumstances, as Monday is yet again my long teaching day: I've got a set of undergraduate assignments to comment on, Plato's "Phaedrus" and Derrida's essay "Plato's pharmacy" to read and prepare for the graduate class and a slew of poems about women by Swift and Pope (plus Johnson's "Life of Pope") for the afternoon class...

It would be nice to see a few familiar faces at the event, and if you are a regular reader here but don't know me in person and decide to attend, please make sure to introduce yourself!

Cafe Humanities: The ABCs of the Novel with Jenny Davidson
Date: Oct 17, 2011
Time: 6:00PM - 7:00PM ET
Location: PicNic Cafe
2665 Broadway (between 101st and 102nd), NYC
212-222-8222

Description:

Cafe Humanities is a series of informal discussions about the questions surrounding the humanities field today, led by Columbia University's foremost professors. The discussions are held at the Picnic Market Cafe at 2665 Broadway (between 101st and 102nd Street).

Professor of English and Comparative Literature Jenny Davidson will discuss The ABCs of the Novel

We often talk about the novel emerging in 17th-century Europe in response to all sorts of social, political and economic factors, in short as a historical phenomenon rooted in a particular time, place and set of intellectual conditions. A historical understanding is so integral to the discipline of English literary studies that we frequently don’t even question the premise that literature is best considered in groupings determined primarily by historical and geographical constraints. Davidson asks what happens when we banish historicism from the explanatory scheme and return to considering novels primarily in terms of their formal properties. Come listen to her share some thoughts about the risks and rewards of this sort of approach, as well as considering how it might let us revisit classics such as Don Quixote, Tom Jones and War and Peace with fresh eyes.

For more information, see www.columbia.edu/cu/english/fac_profiles.htm#jmd204.

Space is limited; $10 cover (cash only) includes one drink

"Let It Bleed"

Ian Rankin prefers vinyl (FT site registration required).

A perfect evening

My brother Michael and my adopted grandfather Gene joined me for the really lovely evening of music that was Nico's "conspiring" with Gotham Chamber Opera at (Le) Poisson Rouge. I really like going to stuff at that place: it is intelligently and comfortably cabaret-style, with lots of bathrooms and food and drink served at the table (the wait staff couldn't circulate so well in this configuration as in some others, so there were delays in table-clearing and follow-up, but nothing to mar the very substantial pleasures of the ear that were on offer). I had in the end bought tickets for all three of us, but the press agent had invited Gene to attend, and had reserved for us what were probably the best seats in the house: we were about ten feet away from the piano, with a very direct view of Nico or whoever else was sitting at the keyboard and performers standing close enough that you could see the amazing vibrations of the glottis (?) that characterize operatic singing.

A couple arias from the Dark Sisters opera (it is the most amazing music, I can hardly wait to hear the whole thing again in November), set into selections of all sorts that highlighted various aspects either of Nico's choral writing or of the singers' strengths: the first bit was Purcell's "Evening Hymn," the last was the evening song from Philip Glass's Satyagraha, a revelation to me (I had never heard it before!). One of the other highlights was a really extraordinary performance of Ravel's sonata for violin and cello by Yuki Lee Numata and Clarice Jensen. I am not a lover of the violin, really, but I was blown away by Numata's performance - she is incredible, definitely a performer to watch for...

(The opera company director Neal Goren accompanied many of the singers, which I think is rightly his prerogative but which caused me to reflect that he played the piano like someone to whom the modern instrument is wholly foreign, he must have trained as an organist rather than a pianist - definitely a thumper rather than a stroker of the ivories - the shortcomings were particularly clear in the aria from Mozart's Il Sogno di Scipione, with terrible approximate bashings-out of notes and wild thumping just behind tempo!... Really in NYC you can almost certainly find on every street corner a superb accompanist who could do a good job with this sort of thing on short notice, but I guess it would give a different character to the evening, so it seems a fair trade-off.)

"Not the neutral 'said'"

At the Awl, my interview with Helen DeWitt about her new novel Lightning Rods.

"Chine that Salmon"

Elizabethan terminology for carving (via Sarang).

Home again

Really I do not have much of an urge to eat at Per Se: multi-hour multi-course meals are not my cup of tea, it is too much money in any case. But - "the stray ends of exquisite donuts"!

I survived Ottawa, I survived yesterday's long teaching day, I survived today's also long day of miscellaneous meetings: really I am about to collapse with exhaustion, but barring a couple of small but important tasks that are pressing, I can now afford to take it easy for a day or so. I have a curiously huge accumulation of work-related stuff that I've been slightly in denial about (internal reviews of colleagues, external tenure letter sorts of thing), but it can probably be done in a day and a half of extended effort if I can get myself back up to normal levels of fatigue first. Tomorrow morning I will go to boot camp and gentle yoga and read a novel, I think - it will be beneficial.

I had a funny and incongruous pair of texts to teach yesterday: Roland Barthes's The Neutral (I am enchanted by this book) and Pope's "The Rape of the Lock". The master's seminar is a good deal of fun: I am enjoying it perhaps even more than I expected to.

Saw Helen DeWitt and Dale Peck's very good joint reading last night at (Le) Poisson Rouge, and will be back there on Thursday for Nico's gig (I had already planned to go with adopted grandfather G., but my brother M. is going to come also, he is working in Brooklyn again!); and my dad is coming up from Philadelphia on Saturday for dinner and a BAM show I found intriguing enough to buy tickets for without knowing anything in particular about it.

Light reading around the edges: Marisa de los Santos's Falling Together.

Light reading catch-up

A very tiring but also very productive week in Ottawa: several pieces of important business seem to have been well and truly accomplished. Collapsed into bed when I got home this afternoon, slept for some hours, then did my reading for tomorrow (Roland Barthes's The Neutral, Pope's The Rape of the Lock and a very good essay by Claude Rawson on mock-heroic and 'Pope's Waste Land') but will have to write my comments on last week's graduate student writing assignments in the morning: digging deeper to get them done now seems impossible. However I think I've done enough tonight that I can carve out the time for the Beast boot camp tomorrow morning: it knocks out everything from 5:45 rising all the way through to 9 or so, with a quick interlude for breakfast post-class before I get back on my bike to ride uptown, so I wasn't sure it really was going to be feasible, but it is a priority as I missed two classes last week.

I had hardly any time to read while I was away (mostly only in airports): an advance copy of Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, Snuff, got me to Canada, and James Lee Burke's Rain Gods whiled away a few nighttime hours during the week and got me most of the way home. My copy of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, ordered from England via The Book Depository, finally arrived in Cayman in September, and B. brought it to give to me in Ottawa, but I haven't even had a chance to crack it open. Fairly busy this week till Tuesday late afternoon, and with one substantial chunk of reading (Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments!) to do for Wednesday afternoon also, but the week opens up as of Tuesday evening and I am very much hoping I will be able to lounge, recumbent, and devour it - I am feeling much in need of restoration and recovery!

Light reading catch-up

What have I been reading, aside from work stuff? Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (genuinely charming - and no, you don't have to care about baseball); Jon-Jon Goulian's The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt (highly engaging); Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone (loved it, can't wait for the next installment!).

At the LRB, Colin Burrow offers a fascinating account of Kristine Haugen's Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment, a book I need to get hold of as soon as I can!

Also: Things Magazine takes up the BLDG BLOG invitation to consider the spatial history of trapdoors.

Blogging is likely to be light this week, as I'll be in Ottawa from Tuesday to Sunday.

Pantone cookies

These are among the most alluring sweets I have ever seen...